At an event earlier today, Microsoft unveiled the next Xbox - the third model, but confusingly named Xbox One. The big focus was TV, integrated Kinect, and all the other stuff we all expected to be forced down our throats. I think it took them 25 minutes to actually come to what should be the core of the story: gaming. Nothing groundbreaking in the gaming department, except for how Microsoft intends to handle the used games market and borrowing games from friends: pay up, buddy!

It seems that they expect the games to offload tasks, like AI, to their servers.

That's an amazingly bad idea. Yeah, I'm sure having a remote computer doing things for millions of users is much more effective, and will work much better, than having the console doing it for one user. That's not even taking into account bandwidth issues and the fact that your game wouldn't work without a connection.
There are good cases for a client-server model with processing on the backend but this isn't one of them.
Epic design failure.

That's an "Awesome" article, btw:

But the Xbox One is an engineering marvel that combines both cloud processing and a heavily engineered game console to produce game effects that Microsoft promises will be truly impressive.

But the cool thing about the box — which has chips with 5 billion transistors in them — is that it can tap supercomputers in web-connected data centers to do processing.

Hi, I'm Dan and I write about technology but I really don't have a single clue. Really, everything in this article just screams "incompetence" or, alternatively, paid shill.

That processing power enables things like instantaneous Kinect, where voice commands immediately activate tasks on the Xbox

Instantaneous. Sure. Except for, you know, the internet.

from waking up the machine instantly to changing the channel on your TV.

Because relying on a remote server in order to change the channel of your TV, that sits right in front of you in your own home, makes sense. well, i guess it does if you don't know wtf you are doing.

The cloud can tackle tasks in games like physics, artificial intelligence, and even some rendering.

Seriously, how out of touch with reality are these people?

The tasks that require low latency, with split second interaction between one chip or one device and another, are those that the box — not the cloud — still needs to handle.

Oh, you mean tasks like physics, AI and rendering?

Your enemy in a game will close in on you, but it only needs to know where you are every second, rather than every split second.

Really? Is that so? Because in the heat of battle one second is a REALLY long time and a lot can happen during it.

The machine has things like Gigabit Ethernet so that it can be ready for improvements in Internet speeds.

The new generation of graphics chips is based on supercomputing technologies

Please, for the love of God, stop writing already.

The box has a couple of 802.11n radios to connect to the Internet wirelessly and with other devices in the room.

"A couple"? More than one? Why would it have that?

The net result is that it can do billions of calculations per second.

Wow, that's ...impressive? Normal?

So there had to be caches of memory on the die, on the CPU, to feed that data to the processor, Multerer said.

Microsoft "supergeeks": making standard features sound like rocket science.

“When you can do two things at one time, it solves a lot of problems,”